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A U.S. judge on Friday threw out the state of Maryland's bid to protect the healthcare law known as Obamacare in a ruling that also sidestepped a decision on whether President Donald Trump's appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general was lawful. In a win for the Republican president, Baltimore-based U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander said Maryland had failed to show that the Trump administration is likely to terminate enforcement of the 2010 law, officially called the Affordable Care Act. (2/1)

In her Friday ruling, Judge Hollander, an Obama appointee, said Maryland didn’t have legal standing to bring the lawsuit because the Trump administration was continuing to abide by the health law for now, which means the state isn’t being harmed. The judge then chose not to decide the legality of Mr. Whitaker’s appointment, saying it would be improper to do so given that Maryland didn’t have standing to bring the lawsuit to begin with. (Kendall, 2/1)

"In effect, the state proclaims the sky is falling. But, falling acorns, even several of them, do not amount to a falling sky," Hollander wrote in her 48-page opinion that entitles Maryland to revive the litigation at some later date. Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, a Democrat, had sought a declaratory judgment that ACA was constitutional and the Trump administration must stop trying to "sabotage" the Obama-era law twice sustained by the U.S. Supreme Court. (2/1)

The suit, filed in September by Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh, has been a counterpoint of sorts to a federal lawsuit in Texas challenging the ACA’s constitutionality brought by that state’s Republican attorney general and nearly a score of GOP counterparts. In mid-December, a conservative federal judge in Fort Worth ruled the entire law is unconstitutional. That case is being appealed and is considered likely to reach the Supreme Court, which has twice before upheld the ACA’s constitutionality. (Goldstein, 2/1)